On July 31, we posted:

“Ten Ecuadorians were arrested while protesting plans for the private Hidrotambo hydroelectric dam along the Dulcepamba river in Chillanes canton, Bolivar province. The arrests came after a six-month land occupation in opposition to the dam. (Got any more info on this? Let us know!)”

Happily, we got a response to this post and are now able to provide you with more information:

The real name of the project is San José del Tambo (Hidrotambo is the company building it), and it would be located near the community of San Pablo de Amalí. It is a 7.8 MW dam that would, according to the Latin American Network Against Dams (Redlar), adversely affect the entire Dulcepamba river basin and its 45,000 inhabitants.

Appallingly enough, the dam is a project of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), supervised by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change! Let’s count the ways in which this is screwed up:

1. Dams in tropical regions can actually give off up to 40 times more greenhouse gases than an equivalent coal plant.

2. Greenhouse gases aside, the devastation that dams wreak on local and regional communities and ecologies make it impossible to honestly describe them as “clean energy.”

3. Have you heard of the CDM? According to Wikipedia, it’s “an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol allowing industrialised countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment (called Annex 1 countries) to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries.” In other words, rich countries get to avoid lowering their own emissions in exchange for increasing electric generating capacity in poor countries. There’s no requirement to take fossil fuel plants offline in these poor countries, of course, so the net result is a global fossil fuel emissions increase.

But of course, the rich countries are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, right? Not because they want to increase infrastructure capacity of poor countries to secure themselves access to the Third World’s resources?

Right.